In Fall Quarter 2024, the UC Irvine ANTrepreneur Center launched their brand-new AI Innovation Course. The AI Innovation Course was designed to introduce students to the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academia, professional industries, and entrepreneurship. This project-based course challenged students to develop AI-driven business ideas, implement AI tools in real-world applications, and present their projects in a clear, impactful manner. The AI Innovation Course culminated in a Final Demo Day, where students showcased their projects for a chance to win prizes.
The inaugural AI Innovation Course was incredibly successful, with 224 students enrolling and actively participating throughout the nine-week course. To highlight some of the incredible student innovators who participated in the course and showcased their final projects at Demo Day, Ryan Foland, ANTrepreneur Center Director, invited these ANTrepreneurs for a series of illuminating interviews.
In this interview, Ryan sits down with UC Irvine Doctor of Pharmacy Candidate Sakhi Patel and recent CSU Long Beach graduate Shrey Modi (Master of Computer Science) to learn more about their startup CuraVoice.
Ryan: Ahoy Sakhi and Shrey! Thank you for meeting with me today. Can you start us out by introducing yourselves?
Sakhi: Happy to be here, Ryan! My name is Sakhi Patel, and I am currently a second-year Doctor of Pharmacy Candidate at UC Irvine. I also hold a Bachelor’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences from UC Irvine, where I was honored with the prestigious Chancellor’s Award of Distinction. At UC Irvine, I currently serve on the founding board of the Industry Pharmacists Organization, am a Teaching Assistant, and previously held the role of board liaison for the Student Societies of Health-System Pharmacists at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. I am also an executive board member of the Indian Pharmacists Association of California.
Outside of pharmacy, I have mentored nearly 100 students as a part-time tutor at Collegewise and work as a medical writer for WritePharma. I also run a personal blog focused on the pharmacy student experience and providing pre-pharmacy guidance, reaching an audience of tens of thousands.
Shrey: My name is Shrey Modi and I recently graduated from CSU Long Beach (CSULB) with a Master of Computer Science. I am an innovator and change-maker dedicated to making a significant impact on people’s lives through machine learning. With experience working on groundbreaking projects, I have developed a deep understanding of how technology can drive change. While I was a student at CSULB, I founded the first AI Research Club across 23 California State University campuses, creating a vibrant community for AI enthusiasts and researchers. I also served on the AI steering committee at CSULB, where I played a pivotal role in guiding the direction of AI initiatives on campus.
I am also the author of a book on machine learning that aims to make the field accessible to beginners and those eager to explore AI. I have also dedicated myself to research that advances the field of AI, publishing eight papers that have garnered over 135 citations. My mission is to continue leveraging AI to develop innovative solutions that inspire others and contribute to the transformative power of technology.
Ryan: Thanks for these awesome introductions. Between the two of you, it’s clear that you have a ton of experience in and passion for your respective fields, and I can definitely see how these interests came together in CuraVoice. Can you explain what CuraVoice aims to do?
Sakhi: CuraVoice is an innovative, AI-powered voicebot designed specifically for healthcare students and residents to enhance their social interaction skills with patients. Despite its critical importance, patient interaction is often not practiced enough in healthcare education, leaving students unprepared for real-world conversations. Developed in collaboration with AI specialists, healthcare professionals, and students, CuraVoice provides realistic voice interactions, adaptive learning, and customizable scenarios to bridge this gap. It features structured rubrics that offer detailed feedback on student interactions, helping them understand what works and what doesn’t in patient communication. With a secure, high-quality design and compliance with ethical standards, CuraVoice offers an intuitive and supportive platform for medical students to refine their patient engagement skills effectively.
Ryan: What inspired you to create CuraVoice?
Sakhi: As a pharmacy student, I found that we did not get enough opportunities to practice patient interactions in a low-stakes environment. It was either when we were being tested for it in OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) or in our rotations where we were dealing with real people. Many of my peers in other healthcare programs (Doctor of Medicine, Masters of Nursing, etc) also felt the same way.
Shrey: As a patient, I had a couple of incidences where my diagnoses weren’t explained correctly to me. As someone who doesn’t have a healthcare background, it was really tough for me to decipher the information on my own. I then started searching for ways in which I could tackle this issue.
Ryan: Why do you think solving the issue of minimal patient interactions in healthcare curriculum is so important?
Sakhi: Solving this issue is so critical because the conversations healthcare providers have with patients can impact their’ quality of care. What we may see as a slightly awkward encounter or even a minor missed detail could derail a patient’s care entirely or even put them in a life-threatening situation. For example, forgetting to ask about the drugs a patient is currently taking before recommending them a cough syrup could lead to harmful drug interactions.
That’s why it is so important to practice these scenarios in a low-stakes environment like the one we’ve designed with CuraVoice. Not only does practicing patient interactions allow us to be more confident in our encounters, but it also helps us quiz ourselves and build on our knowledge in ways most traditional curriculum does not allow for.
Ryan: How does your project use AI to make a real impact?
Shrey: We use speech-to-text to get the response from the user (healthcare student). On the backend, we have an in-house, fine-tuned LLM (large language model) specifically trained on simulated patient interactions guided by various healthcare advisors. We have incorporated OSCE rubrics as an evaluation metric in the algorithm to give users accurate feedback on their performance.
Ryan: What has been the biggest challenge in building and refining your AI-powered solution?
Shrey: One of the biggest challenges was incorporating emotion into the AI’s conversations. This was an essential element to include because we wanted to give users as realistic of an experience as possible. Coming across this type of data to program into the LLM was a difficult task in and of itself. However, with the help of several advisors and a great team, we finally were able to get it set up.
Ryan: Can you share a moment when you realized your project had real potential?
Shrey: This moment came to me during the Sunstone Innovation Challenge at CSULB, where I pitched our idea and won $1,000 as a third place winner. Every audience member that reached out gave such positive feedback and told me they thought it was an amazing idea.
Sakhi: For me, this moment of realization came during the AI Innovation Course Demo Day. This was actually my first time ever delivering a business pitch, but my faith in the project quickly soared as every single judge that came to the CuraVoice table was absolutely blown away by the idea. This gave me confirmation that our idea could take off.
Ryan: Speaking of our AI innovation Course Demo Day, how was that experience? Were there any surprising moments or key takeaways?
Sakhi: As I mentioned, Demo Day was my first time delivering a business pitch. My partner, who has more experience in this sort of thing, was not present, and manning the fort alone seemed like a daunting task. However, the more I talked, the more I realized that others also had faith in our idea. Demo Day also served as a great platform to get insights on our product and the ways in which we were marketing it. The experience allowed me to go back to my team and give actionable feedback on how to better strategize our business.
Ryan: What was the most valuable thing you learned in the AI Innovation Course?
Sakhi: The most valuable thing I learned was the entire entrepreneurial process of conceptualizing and developing a business. While I had previous exposure to concepts like market analysis, having to do that for our own idea was certainly a new experience. I also learned a lot about AI and just how vast its applications were. Before the course, I was really only involved in the healthcare/marketing end of CuraVoice. Now, AI doesn’t feel like such a foreign concept to me.
Ryan: That’s really interesting. How else has this experience changed your perspective on AI and its potential in the real world?
Sakhi: Prior to this experience, I viewed AI with a lens of uncertainty and fear. With all the talk of “AI is going to take our jobs,” I feared that AI would replace my role in pharmacy. After participating in the course and getting more involved within CuraVoice, I now see AI as a tool to embrace in helping me become a better healthcare professional. While I still have a lot to learn, it has been an amazing journey seeing all that AI is capable of, and I am excited to see what the future holds, especially for health tech.
Ryan: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently in this process?
Shrey: From a development perspective, we wish we had partnered with more healthcare professionals/students from the start. They have such valuable insights to provide for the scope of our product, and collecting various perspectives would have been incredibly helpful, especially in the early stages. Nevertheless, we are so thankful for the healthcare advisors we are working with now. We are excited to add more advisors to our team as time goes on, and this is a central focus for the current stage of our project.
Ryan: What advice would you give to students who want to start their own AI-powered business?
Sakhi: My advice would be to assemble a team that plays to your strengths and to not feel like you need to know everything about AI (or even business for that matter) to step foot in that space. Machine learning experts need experts in other fields to make their products work, and being a part of a profession that is not related to software should not stop you from wanting to learn more and participate in this line of work. As long as you are willing to constantly learn, stepping into the world of AI entrepreneurship is a great opportunity for anyone of any background.
Ryan: Thank you both again for meeting with me and sharing your experience developing CuraVoice. To close this out, can you share what’s next for your project?
Shrey: Thank you for having us! Currently, we are in the beta testing phase of our project. We are actively seeking both current students and healthcare professionals to provide feedback and help us train the model to be as accurate as possible before we put it out to the general public.
Sakhi: We are also working on growing our social media presence. With the explosion of AI-powered innovations in the last few years, finding ways to stand out has proved to be a challenge to our creative flow. Once we establish a decent base of beta users and acquire enough feedback, we will be able to move on to the next phase of rolling out the product for student and university use.
Inspired by Sakhi’s and Shrey’s journey and interested in the other ideas coming out of the AI Innovation Course? Visit our News webpage to keep up with the latest interviews, professional insights, and student success stories.
Want help developing your business idea? Then visit the ANTrepreneur Center website to learn more about programming, speaker series, Micro-Internships, funding, and more. You can also learn more about the Center’s collaborations with Blackstone LaunchPad, Tech Coast Angels, Tech Coast Venture Network, OC Startup Council, and SoCal Celebrates Entrepreneurship. Keep up with the Center’s latest news by following them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.